$15 Three Piece Lens Kit for Smartphones – Worth the Money?

Clip on Lenses are becoming increasingly popular with the Smartphone replacing point and shoot cameras. If you’ve ever seen a budget lens kit and have wondered if they are worth the money, we take a $15 three piece lens kit for a spin at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing.

Thanks to the guys a GearBest we have a no name three piece lens kit to test, its officially called the “Fashionable 4 in 1 Cat Style Clamp Style Camera Lens“. I’m not entirely sure where the 4 comes from but we have a Fish Eye, Telephoto and Wide Angle Macro lens which is actually just 3 lenses. To test these lenses out, we used the Nokia Lumia 930 which comes sporting a 20.7MP shooter that is capable of some very decent pictures. We thought that starting out with a solid camera would give the lenses the best shot at impressing us. If you’ve got a crappy camera on your phone, I wouldn’t expect any lens…not matter the price to improve the quality.

You can see that the lenses clamp on to the camera and there is a metal screw at the top to keep the lenses tight to the phone. It is easy to use and maneuver around, it also comes with a slide so you can try to position the lens on top of your cameras with as much accuracy as possible.

Let’s start with my favorite lens, the Fish Eye, you’ll notice in the photos that there is a black ring around the edges from the Lumia’s camera having a nice wide angle. At first I thought this was a deal breaker, but in the end I quite liked the effect that it gave. My only complaint about this lens is that once when I was unscrewing it from the clamp I actually took the lens apart and it fell into about 5 pieces, it took me 10 minutes to figure out which order they went in when putting it back together. You’ve been warned, caution when unscrewing.

The Wide Angle Macro is fine, it gives the Lumia a wider point of view, though I don’t feel like it makes the macro shots any better. Wide Angle is the top feature of the shortest lens.

Wide Angle Macro Lens

No Lens – All Lumia 930

The Telephoto lens is comical on the handset, it even comes with a focus ring…scratch that…like the other two lenses you can rotate the lens to get the shot into focus. On the telephoto is never really gets clear, though there is one section right in the middle of the photo that does crisp up. There is a slightly creepy feeling to the photos and I’m not sure that I would buy it for this reason alone. It has a focus ring which does allow you to get the shots fairly clear, though there is clearly some distortion around the edges. However, for a Smartphone, it is dramatically closer!

No Lens

With Telephoto Lens

No Lens

With Telephoto

This three piece lens kit from GearBest is well worth the $15 they are charging for the Fish Eye lens alone, being able to play around with the focus and angles has been a lot of fun and if you’re wondering if you can go cheap on items like this…it’s worth the gamble since it worked out just fine for me. If you’d like to pick up this exact model, it is still available with global shipping.